sexualization

Bad(ass) Brains

Debbie Rasmussen — Mon, 01 Jan 2001 00:00:00 -0500

I met Marina Zurkow in 1986 on the set of a horror film called Matt Riker: Mutant Hunt. I was the art director. She was hired to be my assistant. It was an entirely inappropriate crewing decision, typical of the low-low budget B-movie genre. I'd never studied art, never been on a film set, and never cared much for horror; Marina had graduated from the School of Visual Arts, she'd propped several films, and she had a true affinity for the horror genre. Needless to say, she saved my ass.

We went on to form a set and prop design company called Medusa Studio, and co-art-directed such noteworthy films as Breeders, Necropolis, and Robot Holocaust. Over the years, we created alien slime pits, orgasmatrons, severed limbs, and a variety of collapsing, corroding, and exploding structures. Eventually, we even made an independent feature film, closer to our hearts, called Body Of Correspondence, which was shown on PBS and even won a very nice prize at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

I eventually got out of the business and started writing novels: They're cheaper to produce and you don't have to feed your crew or find them bathrooms. Marina stuck it out in film; she's directed a lot of music videos, and recently became a total web diva as well. And I'm psyched to be the one to introduce her—and Braingirl—to you.

"Braingirl" is a 10-episode animated series that premiered on RSUB (the Razorfish subnetwork) in February, 2000. If you're a fan of the book Geek Love, then you'll thrill to the animated adventures of Braingirl, a mutant-cute superheroine who wears her insides on the outside. More experimental film than cartoon, "Braingirl" employs clip art, interface aesthetics, japanimation, and rave culture in order to turn a bit of the world inside out—starting with its eponymous anti-superheroine. The series now lives on its own site, www.thebraingirl.com.

Ruth Ozeki: I loved Braingirl the moment you first showed me her picture. She's got total attitude for a girl with no eyes, but there's something sweet, vulnerable, and exposed about her, too, with her prepubescent, plug-like nipples, her hairless neotonous body, and her big naked brain. Oh, and her superhero stance. Where did she come from?

Marina Zurkow:She's a combo of what I am, what I wish I was, and what I'm afraid of being. Her brain says she's smart; her baby fat is almost old-ladyish; her tiny tits are truly adorable; her stance is tough and aggressive; and I have always been afraid of losing my eyesight. I think Braingirl wears her insides outside with aplomb.

RO: But where, exactly, did she start? As a novelist, I understand how a character from a book evolves. But I suspect this is different from what you do. Did Braingirl spring from your brain fully formed?

MZ: You wouldn't think that on a computer characters could spontaneously generate, but every once in a while, you just hit one right on its big, fat, exposed head. I went back through all my sketchbooks to look for doodles. Nothing. I did find early versions of her when I still called her "Brainboy"—she had no genitals at all but she did have the body, the nipples, and the
brain.

At that time, I was very focused on icon-making, with a mind to getting these characters onto streetwear—messenger bags, clothes, posters, billboards, blimps. My dream was to turn the infantalizing iconography of rave culture and japanimation a bit on its head, by tantalizing with Cute but providing some sort of schism at the same time that could cause a viewer some concern and some query. It was only later that I grew Braingirl into a cartoon, and gave her voice.

The first part of her that emerged was definitely her body. She was a response to earlier characters I was making—I called them Prozoids. They were speculations about what would happen if fetuses were born in vitro from cells overfed on Prozac. Those lumpy androgynes had body and psychic crises, but Braingirl at least tried to keep her head on straight. Her brain wasn't exactly an afterthought, but what better way to signify the head/body split than through this manifestation? I've always had an unreasoned fascination with the body, inside and out but preferably both at once and invading each other's state.

RO: How do other people respond to her?

MZ: Women under 45 seem to love Braingirl, to "get" her; women over that age are often too frightened of her prepubescent qualities—they find her grotesque and are offended by her bald vagina. Men mostly appear uneasy and, when pressed, resort to [saying] "she's scary." My favorite [reactions] are [from] the plumbers and telco repairmen who come into my studio and see her on the wall amidst other strong but psychically challenged chick icons, and say "that's cute!"

A sidenote that's apropos: I'm in Helsinki, walking past a bar that's blaring an '80s techno throwback song that goes: "You and me baby we're only mammals/So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel." Braingirl is one response to that rhyme.

RO: How is she a response?

MZ: Two reasons come to mind. One, it's moronic—Camille Paglia, do you like that song? Two, I'm playing with the idea that not everybody's destiny is to be sexualized. I know that might be taken as reactionary, and in part it is: I mean, it's great to be a sexual body, but to some extent it's become de rigeur for the liberated female to sexualize herself.

RO: Let's back up a bit and talk more about Braingirl's you-know-what. Her little parenthetical twat. It's just the merest curve of a line, right? Did drawing it cause you a moment of panic or pause?

MZ: Drawing her little camel's-foot pussy never caused me panic or pause. After years of creating morbid and incendiary visuals, I finally found a simple way to be "naughty".
I could entice and frighten with such a streamlined tool: one little curved line! I did have a moment in which I was afraid of being arrested for pedophilia. But since there's a deliberate ambiguity about Braingirl's age, and since in this day and age millions of adults have shaved pussies, I tried not to give my fear a second thought.

Someone once told me it was "cheating" to rely on disturbing or titillating visuals to lure in an audience. But I just said, "What, you don't want to see anything naughty? Or do you only want it served up on XXX sites for men?" I'm sick of all the naughtiness belonging to the morally bankrupt creators of the world. And I think being visceral—sensual, shocking, and wearing your conflict on the outside, as Braingirl does—is fun.

RO: We know Braingirl is fun. Is she "responsible" work? Is that important to you, to make responsible work?

MZ: I actually do not think I am making morally responsible work. I may be making personally responsible work, and hope that through exploring some of these questions, I end up offering alternative to the status quo that are useful to people. The work I make has nothing overt to impart. I am not a feminist or any other "ist" per se; I am a woman who addresses issues that concern me—independence, body image, social interactions—because they are the questions that can be asked over and over, and when put to oneself make for a more interesting and conscious (though not necessarily
conscientious) world.

RO: Some pretty wild genderblending and genderbending transpires in Episode 6 between Braingirl and her bubbleheaded beau, BagBoy. BagBoy has gone to the local pharmacy and procured love potions for himself and his beloved, Braingirl. But under pressure, he gets confused and slips her the wrong potion. They instantly
switch genders. (This apparently has an historical precident since, in her development, you say Braingirl started out as Brainboy.) What's this all about?

MZ: One of the writers I work with came up with the idea of a gender switch. (He is a magnificent stoner who does not have access to a computer and only knew Braingirl from a napkin sketch. When he finally saw her on my computer, he said "Oooh! she's... kind of... hot"). I happened to love the genital switcheroo, but it posed a funny dilemma: I had to deal with my own conceptions of what it means to have a penis in the following episode, "Meatgirl". And I didn't have a clue! I didn't want to be reductive or cliché (which was hard). The genderbend epitomized the kind of flub that BagBoy, that bimbo, would be embroiled in, after so much inefficacy getting anywhere with Braingirl. In a larger sense, it was a good continuum from the hospital scenes in the previous episode, where "authorities" do not give the patient enough information to properly take care of himself. Fortunately it's a cartoon, where things fix themselves after perilous squash-and-stretch disasters. I think of Braingirl as taking the cartoon genre's physical principle of Squash and Stretch and applying it to the psyche.

RO: Can you explain a bit more about how squashed & stretched Braingirl's psyche is?

MZ: I think Braingirl bends the world to fit her perceptions, and stretches reality to keep her protected from things by which she feels imperiled. Very simple. I think the magic of classic cartoons, like Tex Avery's, is making manifest through the physical what we do psychologically.

RO: And so what did you discover about your own penile conceptions? What was it like to have a schlong?

MZ: Well, I didn't discover much more than I knew already. That it's an external organ which is rather messy-looking when flaccid, and needs to be covered up. That it's a very real barometer of one's sexual feelings, and it needs to be covered up. That because of accompanying testosterone, or because she's simply living up to her own preconceptions, Braingirl acts out the clichés of manhood—violence, anger, and a large appetite.

RO:"Meatgirl" is one of my favorite episodes so far, since the conflation of pharmaceuticals, TV marketing, and meat is something I ran across frequently while doing research for My Year of Meats. Can you talk about what's happening to Braingirl, and where you think this will go in upcoming episodes?

MZ: Braingirl can't figure out what's happening to her since she grew the penis. In "Meatgirl," she eats both a child and a pony. The pony incident causes her quite a lot of despair, and is a wake-up call. In the next episode, she goes to the hospital, accompanied by BagBoy, to find out how to get her gender back. During the interminable wait to see the doctor, BagBoy finds a reset button on the back of her brain and she returns to being female.

RO: People always ask me if my characters are autobiographical, and it's so annoying, but now I'm going to ask you. Is Braingirl autobiographical? Or is she Everygirl?

MZ: Braingirl started as an icon—and to me, an icon is a collapsed narrative that tends toward the symbolic. So I guess she started as an everygirl personifying the old brain-body conflict, the aggressive-yet-vulnerable conundrum. But as the series progressed (and I was making the episodes on such a short turnaround that a lot of the work was directly subconscious, without time for much rumination), she started to have a life. And of course her life crisscrossed mine: I have a mother figure who was absent and who manipulated my self-image; I certainly feel that being tough and independent to a fault is tantamount to survival; and I have a personal thing against the Medical Institution.

RO: Let's talk about being tough and independent. Is this important for all people, or just for girls? And while you're at it, could you comment on BagBoy? Where did he come from? And what's his deal? Is he like anyone you date?

MZ: Although it's changed a little, I think girls need more reinforcement than boys that being tough and self-possessed are good traits. In the case of Braingirl, there's a subtle inference that these traits can also be detrimental—that with no softness, the world is very difficult to negotiate.

BagBoy is neither tough nor independent. He's the one who runs for help or asks for help or asks questions. I'm trying not to deride him, because those qualities can be good ones, just as I don't laud Braingirl for her stubborn do-it-yourself denial, which has been the only survival tool she possesses.

I think I am terrified of infantile, dependent males. And we all know there are lots of them. But BagBoy is useful to Braingirl, and well-meaning. BagBoy provides a test scenario in which Braingirl is able to maintain her distance, and not get too embroiled. He started as Braingirl's sidekick, and somehow he got the better of me, I guess: He was way too much fun to utilize, both as a menace ("Love") and as a medical specimen ("Eyetest") to let him remain a cardboard sycophant.

RO: Has Braingirl gotten more interesting to you as the story evolves? How has the creative process changed? What are your main challenges/difficulties?

MZ: A series is such a different experience from a one-off. And because, for temporal and financial reasons, I started making "Braingirl" before I knew where she'd end up, the series has emerged organically. When I began, I perceived it as a
set of experimental films that would form a narrative aggregate when the series was finished. I had a blind faith that somehow, it would all add up to be a story — not in the conventional sense, but that you'd have a good idea of what you'd seen and gotten a sense of a world that both in each episode but also as a whole, had arc, and a sense of beginning and end.

RO: What do you love most about animating? What do you hate? What sends shivers up your spine?

MZ: Love: making pictures and stories evolve over time with nothing in the way but what you cannot imagine. All the pretty colors. The freedom from the budgets for large-scale film productions. Being able to work at home, alone, and watch things twinkle and dance. Spilling out the brains onto the screen, rather directly.

Hate: doing it all by myself all the time. And even with Flash, the tool I use to animate, it still can be very tedious. Being obstructed only by what I cannot imagine!

Shivers: giving voice to character, and hearing composer Lem Jay Ignacio's music and sound bring my stilted mute world to life.

RO: If you could create anything in the world, what would you make?

MZ: Right now, I'd be happy if I could finish the Braingirl series, and then make the next two pieces, "Little Miss NO" and "Funnelhead", which are decidedly different but have equally strong female leads.

RO: What do you do to counterbalance the influence of your own big, bad brain? To keep it inside your body?

MZ: Yoga. That's the most in-body thing I can think of doing. For years I joked about becoming a head on castors. But I decided that's dangerous. Having a body, brain, breath, and voice is dangerous, too, but a scary lot of fun.

Braingirl can be seen at www.thebraingirl.com or www.allgirlsloveponies.com

Braingirl patches ($3.00 each) can be bought through Marinaís website, www.o-matic.com

Marinaís work can also be seen at her web site, www.o-matic.com

Ruth Ozeki is a filmmaker and author. Her first novel, My Year of Meats is published by Viking/Penguin. She is currently finishing her second. Her films have been screened at festivals, theatrically, and on television. She lives in New York and British Columbia.

Drawn from Memory

Colin Sagan — Sat, 02 Jan 1999 01:25:39 -0500

“I never intended this book to be published,” writes Phoebe Gloeckner in the introduction to her new collection, A Child’s Life and Other Stories. Perusing these finely drawn, mostly autobiographical comic works, which span twenty years, it’s not difficult to see why its creator might be wary of foisting her stories on a public whose idea of an enjoyable narrative is Titanic. Gloeckner’s unsparing memory and painstakingly detailed pen-and-ink drawings of family dysfunction, childhood cruelty, and queasy sex make for seriously disquieting reading. The book takes us through the years with Gloeckner’s alter ego Minnie, whose childhood is dominated by her overbearing, ogling stepfather and whose adolescence is spent on the streets of San Francisco in a morass of unsavory drugs and even less savory men. The unwelcome sexualization of young girls forms the center of every story in A Child’s Life, not to mention the book’s very introduction, in which cartoonist R. Crumb slobbers over the artist (“I’m just like all the other despicable males that appear in these comic stories…. I, too, desired to subject the beautiful, intense young girl to all sorts of degrading and perverse sexual acts…”). In Gloeckner’s hands, the disturbing subject matter translates into absorbing art that’s hard to wrap your eyes around, but unforgettable once you do.

Cheerful it’s not, and neither are the so-anatomically-correct-they’re-scary paintings and etchings reproduced at the end of the volume. Gloeckner’s aesthetic centers unflinchingly on disease and sex (she illustrated J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition), and, as we trekked up into the Oakland hills to visit Gloeckner at her home/ office, where she writes, draws, and clocks day-job hours as a medical illustrator, we couldn’t help wondering what kind of person would be waiting for us. We never thought to anticipate a glowing expectant mom cradling a tiny gray kitten, offering us tea, and busting out with a Hanson album, but there you go.

In the foreword to A Child’s Life, you write that a lot of the work is stuff you’d done just in the past five years. There’s a real thematic consistency to all the stories in that book.

Yeah, I guess I haven’t exhausted it yet [laughs]. I’ve never had my own book before. And I think that’s probably because…well, there are probably a lot of reasons, but one is that my dad was an artist. But he was also a drug addict and went downhill really quick, and I was so afraid of being like him that I never had the guts to just focus on the artwork. I was just always doing stuff, you know, “on the side.” But I didn’t want it to be that way. So recently I decided, “Well, I’ll do this book,” and someone wanted to publish it—and they actually wanted me to do two books, so I’m doing ’em, and I feel much happier.

You illustrate children’s books, too, right?

Yeah, I’ve done five now.

In A Child’s Life, the way you’re portraying the experience of being that age is kind of scary and disturbing; is it weird to then be doing kids’ books that are probably supposed to be more cheerful?

[The publishers] send back a lot of my pictures, because they say, “Oh, this is just too gross,” or “This looks too weird,” so I’m always having to redraw. The last book I illustrated was called Weird but True, and it had stories of, like, a baby with a tail. But the way I drew it, they said it looked too much like…you know, it looked too [dramatic whisper] suggestive or something. I mean, I was looking at this x-ray of this baby with this tail, and I drew it the way it was, with the tail as long as it seemed to be and everything, and they were like, “Oh, you’ve gotta make the tail shorter!”

It’s weird, but they don’t want it to be that weird.

Yeah, nothing gets by them; it’s like the great filter of Random House.

So these are other people’s books that you’re illustrating; have you thought about writing your own?

I’ve got one that I’ve written, and after I finish this next book I want to do that, and then I have an idea for another book. So it’s all these plans in the future, but, yeah, I’ve got one of my own that I want to do, which is very different than what I’ve been doing.

Let’s talk about the introduction that R. Crumb wrote for your book.

[Laughs.]

In the back-cover blurb he says, “She is one of the best, which is interesting, seeing as: A) She’s a cute girl, B) She’s not a very prolific artist…two factors which, one would assume, would be a hindrance to great art.” So the cute girl comment coupled with this salacious introduction—I know it’s very tongue-in-cheek, but I was wondering how you felt about that.

Well, it’s weird. I mean, I never thought I was a cute girl. I always felt ugly, especially when I was really young. And so, when he said that—I mean, first of all, he wrote me this letter a couple of years ago; he was commenting on some story that was in [the all-female comics anthology] Twisted Sisters, and he described how one day he was giving me a piggy-back ride on Polk Street and he ejaculated [laughs], and it’s like, he thought I was so beautiful, and he loved me, and all this stuff, and I just had no idea. In fact, if I look back on my teenage years, he was the most appropriate-acting male figure that I knew! And so when he said all this stuff, it just seemed like a joke to me. I don’t know why that would be a hindrance to doing one’s artwork. I guess if you thought you were really cute and that’s where you valued yourself, then maybe it would be.

If he had meant it in a “Well, society won’t take you seriously if you’re a cute girl” way, he might be right, but that wasn’t the way it sounded; he said it like a universal given, like cuteness and ability are mutually exclusive.

Ask him! “What the fuck did you mean?” [Laughs.]

You’ve talked in the past about, when you were younger, wanting to run away and live with Crumb and his wife [cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb].

Oh, yeah. It’s true, I did. They seemed like the most normal people I’d ever met; they seemed like they were really doing something. And my mother was always gone all night—there was no center to our life at all, it was just chaos. I focused on the Crumbs as being productive, and they seemed to have a really good relationship, and I just thought, what better thing than to live with such people, and to learn from them? And plus, R. Crumb never ever gave any inkling that there was any sort of sexual feeling at all; even though he tries to sound like this bad boy, I think he has it all under wraps.

When you started doing comics, you were fairly young, but you mentioned that it was a surreptitious thing for you—you hid your comics, you were shy about them. When did you start publishing?

When I was about 18 or 19. I was always writing these comics about my mother’s boyfriend, who I was having an affair with. And I didn’t want anyone to know about that. But once I called Ron Turner [publisher of Last Gasp comics]—I was like 16—and said [tiny voice], “I have a story and I want to get it published.” And he led me into his office and sat me down and told me [gruff big-man voice] that I had to learn how to draw everything, and I had to learn how to draw cars, and all these things.

Did your mother or her boyfriend eventually see your stories?

My mother is constantly threatening to sue me. I think that’s another reason why I’ve always been kind of inhibited. Back then, she drank a lot and took drugs, and now she says, “Well, that was the times, you’ve just gotta get over it! You can’t blame me!” And it’s not even that I blame her, it’s just that it’s my story, my life, and she happens to be in it. I’m not saying that we can’t have a different relationship now, but am I not allowed to talk about myself?

So, at this point, it doesn’t affect the things that you’re willing or not willing to write about?

I figure that I don’t really have any choice. I have to get this book and the next book done, and they contain the things that disturb her, and that’s probably why I haven’t done them for so long. It took me a long time to build up the courage to be sued and murdered [laughs]. I constantly have these dreams that my mother is killing me. I just try to look at them with some humor and get on with it.

Do you think that you’ll want your own kids to read these stories? Because they’re very intense and childhood-oriented, but also super dark and disturbing.

Well, I have a daughter who’s 7, and she keeps wanting to read A Child’s Life. I tell her that it’s for grown-ups and she can read it later on. But I have let her read some of my stories that don’t have sex in them, and she always asks, “Why does this person do this?” and we sort of have a discussion about it. She always wonders why nobody is good. She says, “Even the kids aren’t good!” Kids are used to having a good and a bad person, so it’s kind of interesting to see her point of view.

A lot of your stories would seem to come from a sort of victim standpoint, in the sense that you’re relating a lot of terrible stuff that happened and ways in which you were taken advantage of, but ultimately they really don’t propose that kind of victim consciousness. I was wondering what kind of reactions to your comics you’ve gotten from other women, especially the ones that center on the young girl who’s in that area between being manipulated and doing the manipulating. Like the affair with the mother’s boyfriend—it’s a consensual thing, but it could be interpreted differently.

What do other women think? Some women don’t like [my stories] at all. One time I was doing a story for this comic book—it was called Choices and it was for a pro-choice benefit; [comic artist and historian] Trina Robbins asked me to do this story, because she was editing the book. And I told her I wanted to do a story about how difficult it is to make the decision to have an abortion, sometimes—about the fact that you could feel a million different ways, you could have all these conflicting feelings. That’s what was interesting to me. And she was just, like, irate. And she was screaming at me, “What do you mean, conflicting feelings? It’s just a blood clot!” It was, again, that she wanted to see a good guy and a bad guy. And in certain ways that works for her, it’s gone a long way, but for me, there’s never any good guy or bad guy, in anything. People are able to see things from different points of view, and it can be hard to come to decisions. And sometimes that’s just what my work is about.

I had an opening for my show at the Cartoon Art Museum, and there was one woman who was sooo shy and she came up to me and she said [overwrought young-girl voice], “I just wanted to tell you that I really like your book, and it really meant something to me.” And she could barely get the words out, and I was just so flattered by that, because that’s who my audience is. You know, you always hope that someone sort of like you will understand what you’re doing. So that made me happy. But some people get really pissed off. Men often don’t like it, they’re like [makes grumpy noise].

Because they feel like you’re pointing a finger? It doesn’t seem like you are, at all. The stories don’t come off as accusations—or if they do, you’re implicated in those accusations too.

Well, people will always have knee-jerk reactions. There were printers who wouldn’t print it. People see the pictures and they just think, “Oh, sex! Child abuse!” They don’t read the story and try to think about what’s happening. So I think a lot of men have that reaction, because they’ll look at the stories and think, “Oh, there’s a picture of someone getting his dick sucked,” and they get kind of turned on. And then they read further and think, “Oh, I’m not supposed to be turned on,” and then they get confused, and then they hate me [laughs].

Did you ever get feedback like, “You shouldn’t be drawing these kinds of things because you’re a girl?”

Yeah, but not from other cartoonists. People might say, “Why are you doing this?” Or, “Phoebe, you’re just a weirdo.” [Laughs.] But you know, I’ve done it since I was a little kid. I was the one in the class who knew how to draw, so the other kids would always ask me to draw penises.

The medical illustration–inspired art you do, the detailed paintings and etchings of things like cross-sectioned penises or cross-sections of women giving blow jobs—they’re very clinical, and yet they also make sex seem almost stupid. Like you’re poking fun at the physical aspect of what happens during sex.

That’s an interesting point of view. Of course, when you’re drawing a picture, you never quite know why you’re drawing it; that’s the problem with talking to artists. It is kind of a detached point of view, and it makes it all seem kind of silly. But at the same time, it’s what has fascinated me, what really goes on there—not so much in a sexual way, more in a biological way. Like that one of the cross-section of the penis juxtaposed with the cross-section of the whole body? It was just the similarity in how they’re made, in the anatomy, the tube-within-a-tube formation. I think some men have felt—well, I’ve gotten some comments like, “Is this about castrating males?” But it was never that, for me; it was always about looking at things.

Tell us more about the book that you’re working on now.

The new book is based on my diary from when I was a teenager, when I was 15, 16 years old. I’m not illustrating a narrative, I’m just going to set the actual diary text alongside illustrations. Because there are things I didn’t write about—you know how it is with a diary. If things are going well, you won’t write. You write when the dramatic stuff happens.

Is it weird to go back your diary? I know if I pulled out a diary from high school, I would just be so mortified by everything that’s in it. I don’t know if I could stand to read it.

It’s almost like it’s a different person. And I think that’s why I’m able to do the story now, because I think about the character as this really pissed-off little girl who’s not me [laughs]. It’s like some kind of schizophrenic thing—I want to give her a voice, and so I don’t really feel embarrassed about it. I do have to edit to make it readable. That’s a hard thing to do, because you don’t really want to change it, but you also don’t want it to be totally grammatically incorrect.

Obviously your work is very autobiographical, but do you ever change narrative situations or add other elements that aren’t autobiographical?

Definitely. I don’t really believe in pure autobiography; it can’t happen. If you’re writing about something, it’s always processed a thousand ways in your brain, so no matter how objective you try to be, you can’t be, entirely. And as far as trying to fit something to a narrative…nothing has a beginning and an end; there are always things that preceded it, that feed into it and influence it. So I guess you could call it autobiography. But if I do a story now, it’s very different than it would be if I did the same story ten years from now or ten years ago, because how you feel in the moment has a huge influence on what you’re doing. To a certain extent, I think everybody does what you could call autobiography, but it’s just their experience filtered or projected onto other characters or something else. In my case, I’ve used myself as a character. You shape your own past, whether you end up writing or drawing it eventually or not. Psychologists say that they listen to a person’s story, but they’re not thinking of it as, “This is the truth”; they’re thinking, “This is how the person feels.” About what they perceive happens to them. And I think that’s an important part of what I do. It’s not so much the story—it’s trying to figure out what it meant to me, or what it means in the larger sense.

[While Lisa amuses herself by engaging Phoebe’s cat in a one-sided conversation (“Who’s got a tiny head?”), Phoebe pulls a gigantic loose-leaf binder—which turns out to be the actual diary—from a shelf and begins flipping through the typewritten pages, then hands one over somewhat sheepishly.]

You typed your diary when you were younger?

I would carry it everywhere with me! I had this loose-leaf binder, the typed pages, and I was so afraid that someone would read it that I would have it in my backpack all the time.

This almost reads like an adult writing in the voice of a 15-year-old; I mean, it’s a lot more observant of outside things than maybe your average 15-year-old would be. When you write, “As soon as you give men the eye, they puff out their chests,” it sounds like a much older person.

Well, I really didn’t talk to anybody at that time [laughs]. I think I just totally funneled my energy into writing that. I guess that’s why when I look back at it, it seems like there’s so much I could do with it, because it was pretty descriptive. That’s why I decided I had to do this book; it was burning a hole in my brain.

I don’t necessarily want to be doing my childhood forever—I want to do other characters, not just someone who other people recognize as me. But I think I have to finish this, and then I’ll be done with that.

Do you feel like it’s helped you…I don’t want to say “come to terms with it,” but do you see doing these stories as a form of therapy or a means to think critically about the past?

No, I don’t at all. But the funny thing is, after I do a story, it no longer bothers me—if I think about the incident, it doesn’t bother me at all anymore. So I guess it has the effect of defusing it. I think I’ve always been pretty mad [laughs]. I could be mad at my stepfather, but then if I did a story about him, then it sort of…it gives you a power over the things that happened to you, so you feel like you have some control, even though you didn’t at the time have any real control or power. You can say something that you might not have said, or things you might have said, but you’re not sure if you remember saying them, but you put it in there anyway because it sounds good [laughs]. I never intended it as therapy, but I guess it does have that effect. I hope that’s a good thing. Some people tell me that my work is so negative—but I think my work is funny, you know? It feels positive to me.

Get A Child’s Life and Other Stories from Frog, Ltd. Publishers, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA 94712. Or stroll over to your local independent bookstore, bang your fist on the counter, and demand it immediately.

Amazon Women on the Moon

Kyla — Mon, 01 Jan 1996 00:00:00 -0500

Like some grizzled old-timer sitting on the porch of the homestead talking about the good old days, I think back to the first time I saw MTV and pity the prepubescents of today who didn’t have the luck to see, as I did, the wonder of MTV when it first aired. I was eight years old, alone in my living room, and somehow I knew that I was witnessing a tremendous event: a connection with something that just wasn’t accessible through after-school cartoons or Gilligan’s Island reruns. When I recall what I saw back then, I may remember some of the details wrong, but that doesn’t matter. It’s my perception of those early videos that creates the memory, that resonates in my tv-addled mind as the truth. And what I remember best are the images of women that I saw on MTV. I’m aware of those representations in a different way than I was in those first golden days when I sat glued to the small screen, clutching a handful of Fritos. What I say about these images now comes from filtering them through a screen of theory and history and related bullshit, but it still comes from what I saw back then. The women of MTV were not merely women; rather, they were on-screen archetypes of what a video-age woman could be, and they were indelibly printed on my young brain.

The Androgyne

By the time the first little MTV spaceman planted his flag on the screens of cable-blessed homes, androgyny in rock music was old news. This was, after all, the post glam-rock early 1980s. The New York Dolls, Patti Smith, David Bowie and many others had been praised up and down not only for their musical achievements but for their knack of appropriating/mocking the styles of the opposite sex. But the legions of suburban tykes lounging in our beanbag chairs in front of the tube didn’t know about that. All we knew was that there were a huge number of girly-looking guys staring out at us from the other side of the tv screen, and we were mesmerized. Through Adam Ant and Duran Duran, I absorbed the concept of androgyny unconsciously as I giggled dreamy-eyed over these grown men with made-up faces,these boys who looked too much like girls to be the “opposite” sex.

But then there were the actual girls: Joan Jett, who wore head-to-toe black leather and reveled in crunchy cock-rock riffs in her video for “I Love Rock n’ Roll;” skinny, imperious Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. These women’s physical images incorporated a litany of bad-boy references, from pre-zirconium Elvis to Marlon Brando to Keith Richards. They were appropriating the style of men whose blatant sexuality made them “dangerous.” Not so much rejecting femininity as cloaking it in the historical acceptibility of male rebellion, these women were insinuating themselves into the badass canon. I didn’t consciously think that they looked like boys, but when I saw the video for the Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket” I thought that Chrissie Hynde in a waitresses’ uniform was all wrong. And the end of the video, when she runs out of the diner and hops on the the tough guy’s motorcycle—well, that was all wrong too. Anyone who had seen “Tattooed Love Boys” knew that Chrissie would never let her ass be grabbed by a customer and then go for a ride on his hog. She’d get on her own motorcycle and peel out of the diner parking lot, spraying that loser with a mouthful of gravel.

Perhaps the most memorable androgyne of early MTV was Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics. In their first video, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” Annie wore a man’s black suit and held a riding crop (or maybe it was a pointer); her bright-orange flattop rose out of the ensemble like a placid mask of Ziggy Stardust-style unrealness. The dangerous sexuality of Joan and Chrissie’s leather pants was here replaced by the more dangerous sexuality of total gender unrecognizability. No real precedent for female-to-male cross-dressing had been set on television at this point, although the madcap hilarity of men impersonating women had been proven many times over, from Milton Berle to M.A.S.H. The employment of cross-dressing for non-comedic purposes, and by a woman, was jarring. The whispering among my elementary-school friends about this video yielded only one possible conclusion—that Annie Lennox must be a lesbian.

The Future Freak

The second image that appeared consistently on early MTV can best be described as the space-age, futuristic freak. The SAFF, like the Androgyne, took more than one form. There was the faraway-eyed, operatic Kate Bush, the future-Barbie frontwomen of Missing Persons and Berlin, and the space-age amazon Grace Jones, among others. But unlike the Androgyne, the SAFF had no basis in history other than the collective projection of “the future” that held 1980s media in its thrall. Computers, NASA, and ever-expanding medical and industrial technologies were spurring us on to the future, but what about humanity? The fears of future dehumanization, particularly of women, were given paranoid form in movies like Blade Runner and Liquid Sky, where futuristic females invariably took on the form of alien succubi, preying on the hapless male hero. The sexual female, given power, mutated into something evil that had to be stopped by the likes of Harrison Ford. The message of these films? Future women are going to be scary, castrating sexual deviants. The video counterparts of these cinematic women presented an alternative to traditional notions of what constitutes femaleness. The SAFF was not soft, not yielding, and seemed entirely her own invention. Her voice was clearly that of a woman, yet it was not a “feminine” voice—it was robotic, as Grace Jones’s was, or it was the ethereal, otherworldly siren song of Kate Bush.

But the SAFF’s physical image was hyperfeminized, caricatured. In the video for Missing Persons’s “Destination Unknown,” lead singer Dale Bozzio sported a floor-length white mane, a mylar-and-bubble wrap dress, and spike heels, and she sang in a high-frequency baby-doll voice while staring at her own bizarre face in a smoky mirror. This image plays into classic notions of woman as the infant-like, narcissistic other. But despite the contradictions inherant in the SAFF persona, she defined the future—unknowable, cloudy, and scary.

The Bad Girl

This MTV archetype was perhaps the most familiar one. As tough as the Androgyne but less masculine, earthier than the Future Freak, the Bad Girl was like a canny, fun older sister—smart and sexy and cut-the-shit direct. All her songs spoke directly to someone—presumably a guy—who was trying to mess with her, and she wasn’t having it. Pat Benatar, Toni Basil, the Flirts, the Waitresses, and Patti Smythe of Scandal all embodied a kind of fishnet-stockinged consciousness that allowed them to seem like slutty girls while harboring a clearheaded intelligence and the occasional subversive agenda. Toni Basil’s “Mickey” video exploited the whole good girl/bad girl cheerleader motif, with Toni cartwheeling around, pompoms in hand, while delivering the genderfuck line “Come on and give it to me, any way you can/ Any way you wanna do it, I’ll take it like a man.” Pat Benatar took the Bad Girl role one step further, using the video format to star in mini-movies in which she took on the persona of other bad girls. In “Shadows of the Night,” she portrays a 1940s Rosie-the-Riveter type who dreams of being a ruthless, glamorous double agent. And in “Love is a Battlefield,” probably the tour de force of her video career, Pat plays a teenage runaway whose foray into the big city leads to her working in a seedy dance parlor with other unlucky women. But Pat mobilizes the women into a line-dance uprising against their evil pimp, and liberation ensues. Go on with your bad self, Pat!

Sadly, these would turn out to be the salad days of the Bad Girl, because once MTV realized that their main audience was comprised of adolescent boys and their hard-ons, the marketing dynamic took over and these women all but vanished. Pat Benatar and Toni Basil were replaced by nameless inflato-breasted bimbos who writhed in videos by poufy-haired “metal” bands like Warrant and Poison, portraying groupies, porn actresses, and girlfriends. MTV wanted you to believe that this was what a Bad Girl was, but even those of us just graduating from our training bras knew the vast difference between a player and a plaything.

Little by little, the archetypes of early MTV disappeared from the screen, displaced by the ever-increasing popularity of the channel and its ability to create and crush images and fads with heartless precision. The use of women primarily as cheese-metal video ornaments made it necessary for those women who were actual musicians to protect themselves from winding up as yet another babe spread-eagled on top of a Camaro. So women like Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega, and the Indigo Girls ushered in a new era of no-frills videos—no leather pants, no bubble wrap dresses, no Benatar-esque role playing. They played solid, admirable music that also happened to make boring-as-hell video viewing. Having experienced the myriad over-the-top moments of MTV’s first inception, there was no substitute. Well, there was Madonna, who aimed to amass all the aspects of the Bad Girl and the SAFF and the Androgyne into one package, but that’s a whole other essay, and Camille Paglia has got it covered.

Those early images and videos were powerful. They were novelty and stereotype and affirmation. They provided young girls with ideas of rebellion, sex, and self-sufficiency that couldn’t be found in the pages of Young Miss. They allowed us to think critically and find fault with other images of women that we saw not only on MTV, but in other media. They inspired us to rock out. If you turn on MTV today, in between segments of Beauty and the Beach and The Real World, you might—if you’re lucky—see something that reminds you of what MTV once was: that brave new world where the women talked tough and the men looked pretty. -az.